#left liberalism

[yngwrthr]

The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left - The Philosophical Salon

It is often presumed that intellectuals have little or no political power. Perched in a privileged ivory tower, disconnected from the real w

In light of this intriguing article, we become aware how postmodern philosophy emerged as an ideological trend linked to the CIA’s “culture war”, which was meant to convince would-be radicals and baby leftists in the niceties of reformism and identity politics of “intersectionality”, “personal lived experience”, “speaking truth to power”, etc. — anything else without being half as threatening as Marxism. It follows that the dialogue that transpires in Foucault’s poststructuralism, Derrida’s deconstructionism, Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and other contemporary “high priests of French intelligentsia”, frames anti-Marxism and anti-communism in the most insufferable and increasingly incomprehensible garb, while offering nothing — or detracting — in terms of revolutionary analysis. Suggesting the relationship between postmodernism, imperialism, and ideology, the function of the executioners at the Justice Dept. to sanction global capitalism required that they have a knowledge of and spread these philosophies. Thus postmodernism presents itself as bourgeois ideology:

“According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

[yngwrthr]

The whole idea for “Intersectionality” can be simplified as the result of competing “private” experiences that are generally associated with oppression. But, in order to state the problem at all, we would want to say just a little bit more in the direction of “causality” than some story told of conflicting “personal experiences”, isolated one from the other. In so far as the theory of intersectionality fails to achieve “objectivity”, Marxism can much more adequately handle such issues relating to “experience”.

For Marx, rejecting idealism, objective casual relations are pivotal; nature and the social world of “Zoon politikon” are established at the outset. Out of this “totality”, experience, cognition, phenomenology, psychological items etc. emerge. Ultimately, if we are to understand how experience is possible, the present totality in which the individual exists must be taken as capitalist class society. This is the current historical background for perception, for the “experienced world”. So far described, experience of the world — as it is right now — is limited to capitalism.

Hence it is the stage of productive forces which offer the explanation of the production relations which constitute the economic structure which constitute the essence of society, and that the nature of these latter offer the explanation of the sorts of “experience” in response. What doesn’t happen in intersectionality is exactly this recognition of objectivity of social environment. Such a project is neither capable of accounting for the possibility of experience of oppression, nor is it capable of generating coherent notions of what is “behind” such an experience. Thus I am brought to the conclusion that the function of intersectional analysis is to discover the means by which to overcome experience of the thing, to reconcile differences without overcoming the thing itself.

[yngwrthr]

“Green New Deal” daydreams fail to draw the whole thing together between private property, wage labor, capital, value, exchange, competition, etc. — that is, give insufficient weight to such premises accounting for how all of this related to the nature of capitalism, commodity production, and the money system connects to planetary destruction. Replacing wish fulfillment with purposeful thought geared toward revolutionary action, one must consider how the forces of production as organized by capitalist economy (i.e. the capitalist quest for ever-increasing accumulation of surplus value) promotes ecological devastation. The characteristic of more developed market economies is that production is commodity production for (maximum) exchange value; not social production to keep the human organism or environment alive. Severing free productive capacity from the possessors of labor power, its continuation of manic levels of production is moving towards the annihilation of all earth’s species.

In our highly industrialized capitalist civilization, the more we work, the more we produce, the more we will be able to purchase, to buy, to have, to enjoy; the more products they sell, the more capital they realize — capitalist production can therefore have no limits (or can only have limits which are permitted within and do not seriously detract from the context of capital accumulation..!) Market competition and other commercial functions invariably promote a tendency towards “overproduction” and increased “output”. Under the way of capitalism, production will always engender this bias. Because it always favors expanding output, it will continue to be, for this reason and to this extent, a destructive economy.

Environmental sustainability is exactly the type of human need which could be satisfied by rational social control — socialization — over the productive process; in the sense that productive forces could be used in accordance with a conscious plan towards satisfying these sorts of needs in an economic system that is not capitalist. Without lacking this degree of consciousness and with an entirely different purpose of production, the socialist mode of production is characterized by order and control rather than anarchy and chaos. Once society gains control of the means of production, communal production holds new implications.

[yngwrthr]

No End to Neoliberalism in Germany - Damage

What can be expected of Germany’s “traffic light” coalition? More (eco-)austerity, more privatization, more disciplining of the Eurozone, an

With great solemnity, on the 103rd anniversary of the beginning of the Spartakus uprising, Germany has fallen to a state of society much farther from communism than it was a century ago. The modern German left is a comic caricature of Spartakus, mostly thinking in liberal minded terms, and their easiness with bourgeois democracy and identity politics suggests they have all but abandoned and are unwilling to go “back to Marx”. On the other hand, history hasn’t run out of time.

[yngwrthr]

We need books like this: in depth accounts of working class struggles, based on expansive interviews with workers involved. We read the book

“Although ‘intersectionality theory’ does not necessarily end up in affirming identity politics, they both share the tendency to focus on oppression and individual experience of it, rather than on what creates the condition for it. [2] We are currently witnessing a problematic intersection of state ideology and liberal leftist politics when it comes to race, class and gender – and ‘intersectionality’ will be a useless tool to question this. […]

Unfortunately larger parts of the left, often with the understandable humanist goal to support ‘oppressed groups’ in times of a general upswing in reactionary politics (Trump etc.), fail to challenge the state’s attempts to camouflage the deeper systemic crisis by focusing on ‘gender norms and performance’, ‘white privilege’, ‘power relations’ etc., instead of attacking the material reasons from a wider working class perspective.”

[yngwrthr]

Elucidating the difficulties associated with logically understanding this kind of “language”, the words radical “left” liberalism uses to inwardly point towards experience and identity, the impenetrability of its expressions, the incorrigibility of its propositions to the ordinary enquirer, I will let Samuel L. Jackson’s role in Pulp Fiction have the final say:

“English, MF, do you speak it?!”

[sensiblephilosophy]

The Future of Political Philosophy

For five decades Anglophone political philosophy has been dominated by the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls. With liberalism in crisis, have these ideas outlived their time?